Undergraduate Engineering Team Projects: Is There Any Correlation Between Presentation And Participation?

Oral presentations can be used to assess student performances in design projects. In a capstone course, students are required to complete a design project in two consecutive academic semesters. Each project generally involves more than two members. The final group report, presentation, and oral interview are the usual methods to evaluate each member’s contribution to the project. Since these tools sometimes do not suffice, peer assessment questionnaires have also been suggested by researchers to evaluate each student’s contribution to the project. The goal of this research was to evaluate each student’s participation in a team based project from the oral presentation performance. The result will provide an additional assessment tool for an instructor to effectively evaluate each student’s performance in a group. To accomplish this, team project data was collected from freshman and senior level courses from two universities’ undergraduate engineering program. In this research, both, an independent evaluator and peer evaluators evaluate each student’s performance during the group oral presentation. The Spearman's Rank Correlation method was used to determine whether there is a correlation between the team participation and group presentation in the project. For all group members, the result shows a strong correlation between oral presentation score and project participation grades.